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CMS - Discussion

Hello

I was talking to a friend about CMS, and he said that you should rather use a ready made CMS in stead of building your own. In some case he said its not always possible but in 90 persent of them he would do that.

Do you agree with him?

Do you build your own CMS?
Or do you use a ready made CMS?

I use to build my own CMS, but i would like to try something else.
Can you please recommend a good free CMS to use.

I was talking to a friend about CMS, and he said that you should rather use a ready made CMS in stead of building your own. In some case he said its not always possible but in 90 persent of them he would do that.

Do you agree with him?

Abso-freakin-lutely. Building your own CMS is madness. Ok, it's kinda fun if you have the time and you want to do learn - that's why I built one, *years* ago, but not these days. There are so many powerful Open Source examples out there, there is absolutely no need to build your own.

I use Drupal for most things. Some would say it's too powerful for a simply, content managed brochure site, which is probably fair criticism, but there are LOADS of good, free, basic options too. One of my favs in the lightweight division is this:http://radiantcms.org/

When i use drupal, wordpress, typo3, ezine publisher, mambo or joomla, will i need to design my site or structure it a specific way to fit the cms?

Or can i make any design i want, and still use the cms.

Most have some sort of templating engine, which means you can use any design you like. Drupal (mostly) uses PHPTemplate and it's extremely flexible - however the *easiest* way to start is dig through the available themes and find one closest to the layout you want to achieve. Better than starting from scratch. In Drupal's case:

Recommending a CMS is like me suggesting what size clothes you should wear. I know nothing about you, how tall you are, your inside leg measurement and the colours you like.

The CMS you choose should be suitable for the project you're working on, so you need to look at what the sites requirements actually are before diving in. I could recommend a great car for you but if you want to do offroading it would break very quickly!

Every CMS has it's strengths and weaknesses. You may find something like Wordpress suitable for one site but totally inadequate for the next.

I have a very narrow target, very small organizations, where the assistant or the owner themselves changes the content, they have no technical skills. They will not be able to change styles or more complex things. The majority do not speak English.

They upload images, edit through a WYSIWYG text area editor in 2 content areas and the menu categories, approve, and their content is ready and published on their pages. In the worst case they click to open the HTML code of these areas and change image names, only that.

I have not found a non complex, not bloated with unnecessary features and easy to learn and use CMS.

I visited http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and spent countless days reading reviews and testing some (not all) CMSs and I could not found any with those features that I need.

I also searched on Google, I found a couple Flash CMS, more visual (RIA), nice with some complexity but not much, but very costly. And I do not like Flash for CMS due to usability and SEO constraints.

So I have decided to do my own very simple CMS, it is not easy, but customers' like it because it is easy to use.

The strong point in favor of your own CMS is, you can claim is yours and create it however you want it, and if you get a sophisticated customer that requires some special features, you can adapt your own CMS to fulfill these customer needs.

The downside is it is time consuming to maintain it. For this reason I would like to have other alternatives to my own CMS, this is my question:

Does somebody knows about a fast, easy to learn and use CMS that you can suggest me?, something like a simple word processor for the web pages (php/MySql based could be nice, but not a restriction, just because I host in a shared Linux).

I was considering using a CMS called e107 not too long ago. But because of the purpose of the site I am developing having one CMS wouldn't be able to do the job correctly, so instead I've used a smaller set of less well known CMS for specific purposes. Does that sound like a good idea as far as developing a website goes?

These days it's worth getting to know a few different types of CMS software. They all suit different types of sites although getting to know one well usually means you can make most things with it.
I'd recommend learning one large fully features CMS for larger clients and one light weight, very fast one for basic sites.
Here's a summary that may help classify whats available

Vintage cars – Trying to write your own CMS in a WYSIWYG editor
Smart cars – Blogs, nippy, trendy CMS all the same but it’s the social connections that are important.
Classic sports cars – hand coding your own CMS with a text editor, fantastic if you’ve got the time and budget.
Commuter cars – Instant site builders – Good value, boring everyday job.
Winnebagos – Joomla, Wordpress, Dupal - great if you want the kitchen sink
Racing cars – Parsing engines – create lots of lightweight, stripped down code very quickly but not many people like driving them to work
Kit cars – XML - exciting and great fun but complicated to get it to fit together properly.
Buses and trains –social networking system - It’s all about meeting new people
Lamborghinis – Flash based CMS – Look great but not really practical.

There are only three CMS's I keep track of: Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.

Here are my criteria:

If the site is low traffic, consisting of either simple pages or or blog-type stuff, I look first to Wordpress.

If the site is high-traffic or complex, requiring lots of different pages, I look first to Joomla.

If the site looks to require a lot of custom work (specialized modules, that sort of thing) I look first to Drupal.

I'm not saying these are the only ones worth looking at. It's just that there are a lot of them out there and I could waste years of my life learning them all. So I picked what looked to me to be the three best and stay within them (when I'm not building static sites or building completely custom apps with Rails.)

There is a lot of posts about the different CMS available today. My personal opinion is that Joomla is the best CMS available on Open Source Platform.
Drupal is not bad eigther, but I prefer Joomla.
If you want to, please have a look at my Joomla Website. I use Joomla 1.0.15 and a template from www.rockettheme.com.

i want to ask something..
i am new to be in this field..i really want to be a good web developer.
the problem is CMS....;(
all the CMS are stronger and stronger day by day...there's no point to be a proper web developer at all.right?
in future..web developers are going to be starve?

i want to ask something..
i am new to be in this field..i really want to be a good web developer.
the problem is CMS....;(
all the CMS are stronger and stronger day by day...there's no point to be a proper web developer at all.right?
in future..web developers are going to be starve?

any opinion..?

CMS's are just one of many tools that a web developer can use, and in order to make anything decent of them, design and development skills are usually necessary. If you simply install and bung in a premade template that's not really what I'd call web development.